Linguistic Maps Of Europe | Languages Of Europe

Below are represented 10 distinct maps which showcase the languages spoken in Europe. According to the mainstream linguistic classification, in Europe there are 6 major Indo-European language families, namely Romance, Slavic, Germanic, Baltic, Celtic, and Hellenic (alongside a non-Indo-European family, specifically the Finno-Ugric linguistic branch which comprises Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian).

Beside the aforementioned branches, there are also Albanian and Basque (each acting as a separate linguistic family of its own). Unlike Albanian (which is an Indo-European language), Basque is an isolated language spoken in northern Spain and southern France with no certain roots discovered to date.

Some of these maps are based on ethnic criterion, others solely on the linguistic one. The entire major linguistic classification in Europe by linguistic arch is the following one (in no particular order):

‘Multilingual Europe, showing the genealogy of the languages, together with the alphabets and modes of writing of all peoples.’ by Gottfried Hensel, 18th century. Image source: www.commons.wikimedia.org

There is another mistake, as far as I can tell. In one of the maps, the third one down, Ireland is marked with ‘Erse’ and Scotland is marked as ‘Gaelic’. Ireland should be marked as ‘Gaelic’ and Scotland as ‘Galic’. I only know this because I am a native Irish speaker 😉